Providing animals with various dietary supplements and medications such as vitamins, minerals, enzymes, hormones, and antibiotics is a common and well known practice in the livestock and poultry industries. The manner in which these supplements are mixed together and added to a consumptive fluid carrier such as water is disclosed in a number of patents, including the U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,889,443; 4,815,042; 4,733,971; and 5,219,224.
In these references as well as many others, it is known to utilize automated systems which dispense discrete amounts of micro-ingredients, mix the micro-ingredients, and then deliver the micro-ingredients to a feed ration, typically in a slurry mixture form. The prepared slurry may be fed directly to the animals, or may be added to the animal feed rations using mixing or spraying methods.
One step in traditional approaches of manipulating micro-ingredients which can be eliminated is the mixing of the multiple micro-ingredients prior to addition of the micro-ingredients to a feed ration. Feed rations are typically stored in large batch-feed mixers prior to delivery of the rations to a feed truck which then distributes the feed to bunk feeders for consumption by animals. It has been found through various trials that mixing of the feed ration which inherently takes place at the batch feed mixers is adequate for also mixing and dispersing micro-ingredients throughout the feed ration. By requiring use of a mixer within a micro-ingredient dispensing system, the mixer itself is an additional piece of equipment which must be maintained and cleaned, and adds to the overall cost and complexity of the system.
Features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent by a review of the accompanying drawings taken along with the detailed description.
While the following disclosure describes the invention in connection with those embodiments presented, one should understand that the invention is not strictly limited to these embodiments. Furthermore, one should understand that the drawings are not necessarily to scale, and that in certain instances, the disclosure may not include details which are not necessary for an understanding of the present invention, such as conventional details of fabrication and assembly.